An Evening of Long Goodbyes

by Paul Murray

  The slender shoulders shrugged indifferently. ‘She’s marrying him for citizenship. If he doesn’t know that now, he soon will.’

  ‘Ah. Well, that’s good, then.’ I cleared my throat. ‘Dinner seemed to go fairly painlessly otherwise, didn’t it, apart from the, the fighting I mean… The statue, for example, I thought that was a nice touch.’

  This at least evoked a response. ‘A statue,’ she murmured, staring out at the night. ‘A statue…’

  I took a good draught of my gimlet. ‘Look here,’ I said. ‘I don’t want to beat around the bush. Maybe you want to hear this and maybe you don’t, but you ought to know that what happened between Mirela and me, it was a mistake. I had – that is, I didn’t…’ I broke off, trying and failing to untangle the words that were coiling up in my brain like Silly String.

  ‘What happened between you and Mirela is entirely your own business,’ she said.

  ‘Oh,’ I said unhappily. ‘Good. Because I thought, you know, I was worried you might be going to Russia because of me, ha ha.’

  She shook her head, came away from her curtain and plucked an azalea from an enormous bunch on the table. ‘Think of Russia as a last hurrah,’ she said. ‘A whistle-stop tour of my childhood dreams, before I settle down and marry money.’ She clasped the stem between her two hands and waved the flower at me. ‘It’s late, Charles. You should go to bed.’

  ‘Right, right,’ I agreed, clambering off the chaise longue. ‘Well, bon voyage,’ I said, then, impulsively, went over to hug her. It was awkward and stiff; I felt her body pulling back. ‘Right,’ I said again, and backed falteringly out of the room.

  ‘Oh, Charles?’ She stopped me as I reached the door. ‘That tag, do you have it?’

  ‘What? Oh… yes.’ I fumbled about in my pockets. ‘I have your phone too, if you want it.’

  She told me that she wouldn’t need that. ‘I would like the tag though. Just as a memento. Silly, I suppose.’

  ‘No, no…’ I found the dog tag, and flipped it in the air like a coin; as I caught it I laughed. ‘When I think about how you used to worry about that dog, night and day. You always were such a worrier. It was as if you thought your worrying was all that held the world together, and if you stopped for a split second the whole thing would just fly apart. I never did understand it, those were such happy days…’ Bel had picked up several more flowers now and held them in a fan across her face. ‘Do you remember,’ I chuckled, ‘how we used to pretend your mattress was a raft, and the stairs were a river, and we were sailing away escaping from the Serfs? And how we’d act out scenes from Eugene Onegin, and you’d get cross because you didn’t think I was sad enough when you told me you didn’t love me?’ The fan nodded infinitesimally swayed by the lightest of breezes. I rubbed my chin excitably. ‘Remember how we used to help Father inventing make-up? He’d give us poster-paints, you’d get yourself up as Tinkerbell, and I’d be Bela Lugosi. I was absolutely convinced there was a fortune to be made from this untapped market for Bela Lugosi make-up – what is it?’

  Bel had lowered her fan, and was looking at me with a kind of impatience. ‘It wasn’t always happy days,’ she said. ‘There were things to forget, too.’

  ‘How do you mean?’

  She rolled her eyes. ‘Nothing,’ she said. ‘It’s late, that’s all. You should go to bed.’ Then, pretending not to notice me stare, she held out her hand. ‘The tag?’

  I closed my fist around it and lowered it slowly down by my side.

  ‘Don’t be childish, Charles, just give it to me.’

  ‘First tell me what you meant.’

  ‘Nothing, I didn’t mean anything…’ She had turned an angry beetroot colour.

  ‘It wasn’t nothing, if it was nothing you wouldn’t have said it, and what do you want this old thing for anyway, it hasn’t even got a name on it…’

  ‘Oh, for God’s sake, just keep it then!’ she wheeled away exasperated. Immediately I felt sorry and lunkish and I was just about to apologize and hand it over when she spun round, catching me unawares –

  ‘Ow – what are you doing?’

  ‘Give me it, Charles –’ digging her nails in my hand to try and get me to release it. I pushed her away: she pressed her elbow into my chest for leverage, and we tussled for another minute before I twisted her arm to disempower her, but did it too hard so she was thrown back on to the drawing-room floor.

  ‘Oh hell…’

  ‘Get off me –’

  ‘I didn’t mean it, I was just –’

  ‘You were just drunk, you’re always drunk…’ She wriggled away from my outstretched hand to lean against one leg of the chaise longue.

  ‘Sorry,’ I said again. ‘It’s not broken, is it?’ She didn’t reply, just sat folded-up by her suitcase, nursing her wrist.

  ‘It wasn’t deliberate,’ I said, feeling guilty. ‘It’s just, I don’t see why you always have to run things down…’

  ‘Oh Lord – just leave me alone, will you?’

  ‘You do, Bel. I mean maybe you don’t notice, but –’

  She looked up with tears of pain in her eyes. ‘Why do you keep doing this to me?’

  ‘Doing what?’

  ‘Why do you keep making me have the same conversation again and again and again?’

  ‘I don’t.’

  ‘You do, with your happy memories and weren’t-we-blessed, you make it seem like this the whole time I’ve been living in a totally different life to you, you have no idea how it makes me feel…’

  ‘What are you talking about?’

  ‘The way you talk about us, the way all your stories are about when we were little children, like nothing ever happened after we were ten years old, and everything bad you can just paint over and forget –’

  ‘I’m not painting over anything.’

  ‘Me in the hospital, why don’t you ever talk about that? Didn’t that happen? It was you who called the ambulance, wasn’t it? Or did I imagine it?’ The embers from the fire cast a deep-red livid glow over her face: she rubbed her wrist agitatedly, brushed her nose with her sleeve.

  ‘It was a painful period in our lives,’ I said. ‘Just because I don’t talk about something doesn’t mean I’ve forgotten it, or painted over it…’

  ‘You do!’ She struggled to her feet, the injured wrist held in one hand giving her a martyred aspect. ‘Even tonight when I’m going you come home with some stray dog you found half-dead because you don’t want me to remember the first one, because you think you can just erase the memory when the whole point is we shouldn’t be trying to forget it, we should be remembering it and what a rotten thing it was for Mother to take a little puppy and –’

  ‘It was just a bon voyage gift,’ I protested. ‘It wasn’t supposed to be some kind of existential –’

  ‘It was, Charles, it always is, and then you start in on me with remember this remember that and everything you don’t want to remember either just disappears or else you twist it around to make it fit this illusion you live in, just like the rest of them with their statues and their tradition and perpetuating Father’s legacy – but it’s worse when it’s you, because you were here, you know it’s not true.’

  It was late, and I should have known to leave her be. In a very short period of time she had worked herself into quite a state. But I was a little the worse the wear myself by this point, and suddenly I had had enough of her put-downs; so I told her rather harshly that I hadn’t the faintest clue what she was talking about.

  She ground her hand against her cheek frustratedly. ‘This, Charles. The whole house. All the lying and pretending and putting on masks, everybody doing whatever they can to avoid having to actually confront reality, everything paid for by conning old ladies into thinking they can be young again – it’s a total fiction, all of it. That’s all it’s ever been, it’s what the house was built on.’ She paced out to the fireplace and back, circling like some tormented moth. ‘And now it happens all over again, with Harry and Mirela, an
d this phone company using us to make itself look like something instead of a bunch of Scandinavian venture capital. And Mother trying to look like she cares, and more lying and pretending, and that’s Father’s legacy, Charles, that and a hundred bank accounts that we don’t even know where they are, and yet you still won’t admit it, even when you know what went on up there, Jesus Christ you know how he died, and then you think to ask me why I’m going to Yalta – God, when I think of spending another second here…’

  In the window lightning snapped, transforming the room momentarily into an engraving. ‘Are you finished?’ I said quietly.

  ‘Yes I’m – why, wait, where are you going?’

  ‘I’m going to wake Mother,’ I said.

  ‘What?’ She scurried round and interposed herself in front of the door. ‘What?’

  ‘I’m going to get Mother, and then I’m going to call the doctor,’ I said, setting her aside. ‘You’re hysterical.’

  ‘I’m not hysterical,’ Bel said, shocked. ‘Why do you think I’m –’

  ‘You’re hysterical, and I’m calling the doctor. You’re not in any shape to be going anywhere.’

  ‘That isn’t fair, Charles, just because I tell you something you don’t want to hear doesn’t mean I’m hysterical,’ she stretched out a hand, which I dodged easily, ‘just because something happened once you can’t keep –’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I said stolidly. ‘I have to do it.’

  ‘But it isn’t – wait!’ springing back nimbly to block my path again. ‘Wait, Charles – Charles, wait –’ She hung her head, pinched her nose with one hand, took a deep breath. ‘Wait, there’s no need to drag Mother out of bed. You’re right. I’m overwrought. It’s been such an exhausting day. I’m sorry. I just need a minute to calm down, that’s all. Why don’t we just –’ she cast about her, then caught sight of the bottle poking out of my pocket, ‘why don’t we just sit down, and pour ourselves a drink, and calm ourselves down.’

  She tugged at my shirt buttons pleadingly. I wavered. Her eyes seemed chaotic and far too white: still, a drink would really hit the spot about now.

  Bel fetched a glass and poured a healthy shot for herself, then one for me. We sat on the chaise longue and sipped and looked out at the storm, as placid and genteel as if we were taking tea on the lawn. Unprompted, she began to chat about this masterclass in Yalta, and how the residence had been Chekhov’s country house when ill health forced him from Moscow; how he’d lived with his actress wife Olga and written his last play, The Cherry Orchard, there; how on his birthday he’d returned to Moscow for its first performance, and had a coughing fit when the audience called him out on stage; how he’d died peacefully two months later, at the age of forty-four. And what she’d said, or almost said, a moment before, hung undispellably in the room, invisible and odourless as asbestos. And after we’d lapsed back into silence, and sat there a while longer, I said: ‘Do you remember the night of the school play, Bel?’

  ‘Mmm?’ she said absently.

  ‘When you did The Cherry Orchard, and you forgot your lines. You went totally blank, do you remember?’

  ‘Of course I remember,’ she said.

  ‘I was telling Frank about it and I realized I never did ask you what happened.’

  ‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘I suppose I mustn’t have learned my part very well.’

  ‘You had that big fight with Mother,’ I said. ‘And the next day you got sick. But we never talked about it.’

  She looked at me curiously. ‘I have a better idea, Charles,’ she said, getting up. ‘Go to bed. Drink your drink and go to bed, and tomorrow you’ll have forgotten all about this.’

  ‘I thought you said we ought to be remembering things.’

  The vodka made the air seem close and velvety like a cushion. Behind her the sky sparked silver again and reeled into darkness and I thought suddenly of Gene Tierney waking up in her hospital bed after her electric-shock treatment not knowing where, or who, she was.

  ‘You know what happened,’ she said quietly.

  ‘Tell me again.’

  She chewed her knuckle thoughtfully. She looked at the clock, the dying embers in the fire. ‘I suppose it doesn’t matter,’ she said. ‘You won’t believe me anyway.’ She picked up the azaleas again and went to the curtain, beating them rhythmically against her palm. ‘But it wasn’t that night everything happened,’ she said. ‘It was a few days beforehand. We all got half-days that week, so we could go and practise our lines. It must have been a Wednesday, because the maid was off. I was in my room, going over a couple of scenes, when I heard this – I don’t know how to describe it. In my memory it’s just this sound of… trouble. I didn’t know what it could be. There wasn’t supposed to be anyone in the house. I opened the door to see what it was, and I found this girl, standing there, totally naked. Just standing there, it was like something out of a dream. She had this blue eyeshadow on and she was staring right at me but I don’t think she knew I was there. I don’t think she knew where she was. Her eyes were just these blanks. For a minute we stood there blinking at each other, and then Father came round the corner and she bolted off down the stairs. I was left there looking at him. I think I said something like, ‘What’s up?’ And he grabs me and goes, ‘Christabel, there’s been an accident, I need you to help.’ He kept saying it over and over. He wouldn’t let me go. There was no accident, obviously. But whatever had happened the girl was in hysterics, and she wouldn’t let him go near her. So I had to go and look for her. She was in the utility room, wedged in behind the dryer, you know where Mrs P keeps the ironing board? I found her in there and Charles, all I wanted to do was get in beside her, she looked so small and thin, so defenceless, like a little animal. Wearing nothing at all except this eyeshadow, all this dark-blue eyeshadow, that made me think of those scary Egyptian goddesses, Isis and Nephthys and those ones? But I talked to her and took her to the bathroom and washed her and calmed her down. She was okay after a while. There was nothing really the matter with her. She’d just freaked out. She was just so young. She went upstairs to put on her clothes and I called her a taxi. Father stayed out of sight. Then she was gone, and I went back to my room to read my lines, and it was like nothing had happened. He didn’t say anything to me about it and I didn’t intend to tell anyone else. Not to protect him, necessarily. More that I thought if I didn’t tell anybody it would feel less like something that had really happened. But of course I couldn’t stop thinking about it. Suddenly it was like everything in the house revealed this new meaning. The locked doors, the photographs. I’d stand in my room and look at all the things he’d given me, the clothes, jewellery, perfume, and I’d think, did he give the same things to his – to the models? Did he pickup three of everything at the airport? Or did he see something looked nice on some girl he was…’ She paused decorously. Outside the night shuddered and boomed. ‘And then I started throwing up. I couldn’t keep anything down. Mother thought it was nerves because of the play. Maybe it was, partly. And the night it was on, she was so sweet, telling me not to worry and how she’d played Varia when she was a little older than me and then before I could stop myself it all came out. I was crying and everything just came out. I didn’t think how she’d react. Or I thought she would want to know. I mean I thought that that was the whole point of the truth, that you told it. And you know she was always the one chasing after us to stand up straight and tuck in our shirts and not steal Thompson’s apples. For a while when I’d finished she didn’t say anything. I remember she was standing beside the sink with her mouth closed, and I was sitting at the kitchen table in this ridiculous Russian ballgown just wishing she’d say something. But then when she did I wished she would stop because it was so horrible. The main thrust of it, though, was that I had made the whole story up. She was so angry – so angry I was worried she might damage herself, and I started thinking that I must have made it up, and I wondered why I would do such a horrible thing, which is when everything got confusing.’


  She stepped across to the mantelpiece and trailed her fingers over the marble; I lifted the glass to my lips and found it was empty. I reached for the bottle.

  ‘If I hadn’t told her, everything would’ve been fine. She knew anyway, that’s what I realized afterwards. Everybody does it. It’s a part of the fashion world. They take these fourteen-year-old girls away from their homes, they turn them into fantasies, they make them famous and rich and in return… well, who could resist it, making love to an actual work of art, to your very own creation? It’s a kind of a droit de seigneur, I suppose. And then they wonder why two years down the line their artworks are anorexic or swallowing razor blades. But of course Mother knew about it. I presume they’d come to some kind of arrangement. Or maybe she didn’t care what he did, so long as it was discreet. All she wanted was to have the city at her feet again, everybody paying her compliments like in the old days. Like at that dinner party tonight, she was so happy. She was even thinking of giving you a room in the new wing, Charles, if you hadn’t made such a mess of things. But she never forgave me. I broke the rules. Everything’s fine as long as nobody tells. Everyone knows and everyone pretends not to and that’s how the world keeps turning. But once the truth starts coming out, the entire artifice crumbles. There’s too much at stake for that to be allowed to happen. That’s what she was trying to tell me the night of the play. And you know, she always did say an actress should never concern herself overly with the truth.’ She cupped her hands round her vodka glass and hunched her shoulders. ‘But I never was much of an actress.’

  She paused and drank and refilled the glass. I wanted to stand up and say something but there was a weight pressing down on my chest and I was having some kind of problem with my vision. I didn’t seem to be able to make out the whole room: instead individual areas were being illuminated one by one, like lights in a pinball machine – the pink vinyl suitcase at my right foot; the hounds tearing at Actaeon; the swell of green metal over the front wheel of the Mercedes outside the garage; Bel’s legs white as candlesticks under the whipping black dress as she came back and stood in front of me.